Shanghai : The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City 1842-1949 ebook

by Stella Dong

Journalist Stella Dong captures all the exoticism, extremes, and excitement of this legendary city as if it were a larger-than-life character in a fantastic novel has been added to your Cart.

Shanghai : The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City 1842-1949 Stella Dong plays tour guide to Old Shanghai, that decadent seedy mega-city born in the last years of the Manchu Empire.

Shanghai : The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City 1842-1949. 0786196173 (ISBN13: 9780786196173). Stella Dong plays tour guide to Old Shanghai, that decadent seedy mega-city born in the last years of the Manchu Empire. Shanghai, being an ungrateful daughter, was the center of intrigue and funding that finally toppled the last Emperor of China in Beijing.

Includes bibliographical references (p. -305) and index. Stella Dong's biography of Shanghai explains precisely why a missionary once declared, "If God lets Shanghai endure, he owes an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Journalist Stella Dong captures all the exoticism, extremes and excitement of this legendary city as if it were a. .

Journalist Stella Dong captures all the exoticism, extremes and excitement of this legendary city as if it were a larger-than-life character in a fantastic novel. As insightful and scholarly as it is detailed and gripping, Shanghai is a "brilliant tableau of creative energy and decadent humanity" (Seattle Times). Transformed from a swampland wilderness into a dazzling modern-day Babylon, the Shanghai that pre-dated Mao's cultural revolution was a city like no other: redolent with opium and underworld crime, booming with foreign trade, blessed with untold wealth and marred by abject squalor.

I was fascinated by Stella Dong's book "Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City. I lived in Shanghai for almost ten years prior to, during, and after the Second World War and wrote about that experience ("Strange Haven: A Jewish Childhood in Wartime Shanghai"). The book is encyclopedic about the history of Shanghai from 1842-1949, a tumultuous period including the opium war, the boxer rebellion, the two World Wars, the rise and fall of Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist movement, and the ultimate virtual surrender of the city to the communists.

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Written by. Stella Dong. Book Lust (55 items) list by NC Torres. Published 10 years, 9 months ago. View all Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City 1842-1949 lists. Manufacturer: HarperCollins Release date: 11 October 2001 ISBN-10 : 0060934816 ISBN-13: 9780060934811.

Enter Zip Code or city, state. Error: Please enter a valid ZIP code or city and state. Good news - You can still get free 2-day shipping, free pickup, & more. Recounts the history of Shanghai, a main point of contact between China and the outside world, and a place with great contrasts, ruled by gangsters and the birthplace of the Communist Party in China. 17,500 first printing. Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of the Decadent City 1842-1949.

Stella Dong is the author of many historical books on China, most notably Shanghai 1842-1949: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City (Harpers), Peking: Heart of the Celestial Empire (Formasia).

Stella Dong is the author of many historical books on China, most notably Shanghai 1842-1949: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City (Harpers), Peking: Heart of the Celestial Empire (Formasia) and Sun Yat-sen: Enigmatic Revolutionary (Formasia). Born in Seattle, she worked for several magazines before her first book. She is known for her perceptive articles on Chinese-American writers, and has a regular column on American-Asian cultural affairs in Hong Kong's South China Morning Post.

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Transformed from a swampland wilderness into a dazzling, modern-day Babylon, the Shanghai that predated Mao′s cultural revolution was a city like no other: redolent with opium and underworld crime, booming with foreign trade, blessed with untold wealth and marred by abject squalor.

Journalist Stella Dong captures all the exoticism, extremes, and excitement of this legendary city as if it were a larger-than-life character in a fantastic novel.

FRAY

Stella Dong's bid to enter the ever-burgeoning world of "lite" cultural histories of important world cities (such as the city studies of Jan Morris) is nothing if not entertaining, and her account of life in the "Old Shanghai" from between the Opium War and the Communist Revolution moves along with a wealth of all sorts of interesting social tidbits about a city that was notorious site of decadence and pleasure-seeking for decades in the West and East alike. Because the work is somewhat gossipy and lightweight in nature it might have benefitted from a sharper sense of humor and irony, or from a more personal point of view (all of which we see in Jan Morris's work). At the very least, it needs at least some photographs of its primary locales and figures, and also clearer chapter subdivisions--at times, the book just seems to grind along somewhat from topic to topic with little direction. But it still is a fun overview of a very fascinating site for the colonialist imagination

Mr.Bean

on the rise and fall of Shanghai from 1842 to 1949. Starting out with warlords, three separate entities (International Settlement, French Concession, Chinese Territory), gambling, arms, guns, opium, prostitution, rags to riches, white Russian women, David Sassoon family (Iragi Jews), Hardoon garden, Hsu Chi-mo, Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Yat-sen, Soong three sisters, T.V. Soong, H. H. Kung, mob-figure Tu Yueh-sen (Al Capone of the orient), Mao Tse-dong, Chou En-lai, 40,000 Jews in Shanghai ghetto (Hongkow), Wang Ching-wei, rape of Nanking, Japanese took over in 1943, 8,000 foreigners (British, Americans, etc) in Bridge House (concentration camp), Germans could not kill the Jews in Shanghai, 500,000 ounces of gold moved to Taiwan.... to Communist taking over in 1949. Many of these events were clearly researched and documented. It is a worthwhile read. If anyone will make a movie, it will be fascinating.

I was born in Hongkow, Shanghai. I learned about these events in bits and pieces when I was growing up in Taiwan. Of course, I only got one side of the story from Chiang Kai-shek, that everyone is bad except him. Now I look at the whole picture, Wang Ching-wei is not a bad guy after all. He was able to accomplish one government (no more three separate entities) while none of the others could.

Feri

Seems like a good book, but I hate that it has no research of primary sources and no footnotes/endnotes at all. If you are reading this for fun and general knowledge, it is a good book. If you are a historian and want to quote this... it's not a very reputable book to do so (in the sense that it does not follow the typical academic format where every claim is justified with quotations). Still, I think the author does a good job in portraying Shanghai and the book is full of insights and colorful stories. Fun read.

Kemath

This book does well for what it attempts to do - cover the connection between organized crime in Shanghai and show its affects on government, economic and social life of the city in that era. I would have liked to have read more about the personal lives of the three big names that headed the Green Gang in its day, especially that of Chang Hsiao-lin.

Bolanim

I appreciated the backstory this book provided on Shanghai and it was a fantastic pre-trip read. The writing gets bogged down in the details of the various revolutions, but the overall writing is well done and paints a bewitching picture of a fast-moving and ever-evolving city from the mid 1800's onward.

Inerrace

It's not a scholarly tome, and I don't think it aims to be. Instead it's a decent introduction to both Shanghai and the historical period that corresponds to the rise of the city that is an easy, breezy read. That's a lot of history, economics, politics, sociology to cover and Ms Dong made a coherent job of it.

Alien

Alas, despite the enticing title and initially engaging, gossipy style, this book bogs down in repetitive trivial details while failing to explore fasciniting topics to which it alludes (such as the international drug trade in the early 20th century and its links to Shanghai and to international arms trading after WWI). Little effort is made to identify individuals as they reappear in subsequent chapters or to present a coherent historical narrative. This is one of the very few books I have ever simply chosen to put down rather than finish.

Loved this book. My mother grew up in shanghai and Stela Dong's book is a wonderful accounting of the city's fabulously rich roots.